Re: GRUB and WIndows XP

[Yedidyah Bar-David]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 02:46:44PM +0100, Andrי He‗ling wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I have Red Hat 8 and a few days ago I was using Windows 2000 just fine
> using GRUB as the boot manager. But suddenly ntldr was missing.

I do not think this was because of grub. Unless you changed something,
it usually doesn't change its behaviour.

> I tried fixmbr and fixboot from the Win2000 recovery console but no
> chance. Of course, fixmbr has written the original boot manager from
> Win2000 and so GRUB was out of the MBR.
> So I booted from the Red Hat CD into a rescue console and used
> grub-install /dev/hda1 in order to rewrite GRUB into the MBR.
> On /dev/hda1 Windows is installed.

That is the main problem. You should have done grub-install /dev/hda -
hda and not hda1. hda is the MBR (the start of it is the MBR), hda1
is the Windows partition. Its start has the Windows boot sector, over
which you dumped grub.

> /dev/hdb is the Linux harddisk.
> GRUB now works, but if I try to boot Windows 2000 the screen flashes and
> again the GRUB menu is there. At least I expectated that ntldr would be
> missing. Now I can't get access to /dev/hda1 (NTFS) from Linux, either.

Because RedHat actually configed grub to simply load whatever that's on
hda1 when you choose Windows. Since you put there grub, it loads itself.

> 
> But this is not the real problem because Windows 2000 was getting a
> little bit slow, etc. So now I want to format C: (/dev/hda1) and
> install Windows XP on /dev/hda2 (D:), because on D: there is more space
> left. C: is then used for something else.

That's very relaxing, because I think you'd have a hard time recovering
your old hda1 if you needed it.

> 
> After the Windows XP install I will get the Windows XP boot manager so
> that I can't boot Linux any longer. To fix this I thought I could use
> /sbin/grub-install.
> But now I am afraid that grub-install will damage the MBR again, so that
> I can't boot Windows XP and therefore only Linux (just like it's now).
> 
> So my questions:
> If I am going to install Windows XP to /dev/hda2, will the MBR of WinXP 
> still be on /dev/hda1?

As I said, no. /dev/hda .

> What is the proper use of grub-install? I think that there has occured a
> problem using "grub-install /dev/hda1" and maybe it damaged this
> partition.

grub-install /dev/hda

I do not think I tried doing this directly from the RedHat CD (in
rescue mode). What I do, is inside this rescue, chroot to the Linux
installed on the disk (I think the CD mounts it as /target or something
like that - df will tell you), and inside the chroot I run grub-install.
This way I make sure grub-install sees the very same files and confs it
should see, and not (maybe) something wrong on the rescue CD.

Good luck,
-- 
Didi

> I know it must work because the Red Hat setup wrote GRUB properly and
> made the config file so that I was able to boot Linux AND Windows
> without touching anything.
> 
> Thanks!
> -- 
> Regards,
>   Andrי
> 
> 
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